Matthew Canavan (Queensland, Liberal National Party) Share this | Hansard source

The government's absolute priority here in this space is to protect the safety of residents and to provide quality care to those in aged-care facilities. It should be a priority of all Australian governments to do that. Of course we express deep sympathy for those who have lost loved ones through this terrible pandemic and those who have had to live with the fallout of a terrible outcome that has occurred, particularly centred around Victoria, but not only there, through the past few months.

I also want to acknowledge upfront that it is right and proper that the opposition come into this place and ask us questions on these issues. There have been terrible outcomes for Australians through the pandemic, and it's right that we convene parliament to allow the opposition to hold the government to account on these issues, to ask questions particularly on behalf of those affected families and residents and to get answers from the government on those things. I think Minister Colbeck over the past week now has taken almost every question from the opposition, and the government is open and transparent about what it is doing, what it has done and where it has gone wrong. And we do acknowledge that things have gone wrong from time to time. We would prefer things to have gone better than they have, but of course this coronavirus pandemic has overwhelmed many governments and many plans that were in place. The plans put in place for aged-care facilities back in January have had to be updated and renewed given the special circumstances of this pandemic.

While I acknowledge the correctness of the opposition bringing questions on this issue into this place, the opposition would have a lot more credibility if they held the Victorian Labor government to the same account as they are seeking to do here in this place. Calls for people to resign from this place aren't echoed for the errors and missteps that have occurred in Victoria—which, may I say, seem to be on a much, much larger scale, and indeed the origins of all these problems come from the deficiencies of the Victorian government.

We saw a bizarre situation yesterday. Mr Albanese, the Leader of the Opposition, was calling for coalition ministers to resign but, at the same time, he was continuing to defend the disastrous decisions of the Andrews government. In the Daily Telegraph today, 'Albo's "blind spot" on Dan' puts it nicely and succinctly. The Daily Telegraph points out that yesterday on the ABC Mr Albanese was defending the shocking record of the Victorian government's tracking and tracing system; not just the hotel quarantine system—that's a whole other story—but the tracking and tracing system in Victoria, which has clearly not been up to scratch. Mr Albanese is running a protection racket for the Labor Party, not a proper accountability mechanism for all Australian governments.

If only the Victorian parliament and the Victorian people could hold their government to account as much as is occurring here in Canberra. We have convened the federal parliament. We've brought people from all around the country, with different quarantine arrangements and different border restrictions. We've made it work because it's right and proper to have the parliament here to answer these questions. Yet the Victorian parliament refuses to sit—or the Victorian government refuses to allow the Victorian parliament to sit. Like some modern-day King Charles, the Victorian Premier is saying no. He's not allowing the parliament to sit and, just like King Charles, the only way he's going to reconvene parliament is to give himself more executive powers so that he doesn't have to have parliament back again. In fact, I had a look at it last week. The Victorian parliament, by my calculations, has sat for, I think, seven days in the last five months. It is around 150 days since coronavirus took off and necessarily caused some disruption to parliamentary sittings. Despite parliaments all around Australia and the world finding ways to sit and to do things remotely in this new and modern world, the Victorian government continues to hide from the people. It continues to hide from accountability, and the Labor Party here federally are complicit in providing that protection.

I won't have time to talk more, which I would have loved to do, about some of the things that we are doing to fix the situation in Victoria. My colleague, Senator Rennick, might take up some of that. We are making sure we provide substantial assistance to the aged-care sector to help with increased staffing to deal with the issues of having to displace staff when an outbreak occurs in a facility and providing the Defence Force where possible. We'll continue to do that, because our focus remains on providing adequate, quick care to those in this terrible situation. (Time expired)